While we all know about the power of content marketing and the importance of creating engaging and valuable content. The problem is that, for most businesses anyway, is that a lot of the content that ends up getting produced is just plain boring.
No matter how well-produced or informational your content may be, it’s not going help you draw in new leads if it’s exactly the same as every other blog post out there.
Enter the online quiz.
By far, one of the most criminally underrated types of content out there are quizzes, which is ludicrous when you consider the fact that:
- The average quiz is shared 1900 times (Buzzsumo)
- The average lead capture rate of a quiz is 31.6% (LeadQuizzes)
- On average, interactive content generates twice as many leads as passive content (Kapost)
- 70% of marketers say that interactive content is effective at converting site visitors (Ion Interactive)
- 79% of marketers agree that interactive content results in repeat visitors (Content Marketing Institute)
The results are in, and they all say that quizzes are one of the most effective types of content at engaging with and capturing leads.
In this article, not only will we be going over why you need to start adding quizzes into your marketing strategy but also how you can build a lead generating quiz for yourself.
So, without further ado, let’s get into it.
Why Should I Create a Quiz?
Marketers and publishers have long-understood the power of quizzes.
In the early 20th century newspapers and magazine would include simple puzzles like crosswords and sudoku in their pages as a way to further engage with their readers. Cut to the 1970s and magazines like Cosmopolitan began publishing personality-type quizzes to great success, to the point where quizzes even became a defining feature for Cosmopolitan.
Fast forward to today the humble quiz has evolved yet again to be one of the most effective forms of lead generation out there. Buzzfeed, being the best example of using quizzes to drive tons of traffic online.
As evidenced by their popularity in newspapers and magazines, on one level quizzes are a great way to attract audiences. They’re ideal lead magnets due to their highly personalized content and interactive interactive nature.
Instead of asking someone to passively watch a video or go through blocks of text, a quiz is one of the unique types of content that require users to actively engage with it. Making quizzes a fantastic and easy way to introduce someone to your brand, or keep them engaged for longer periods of time.
Beyond attracting audiences though, what makes a quiz so powerful at lead generation is its ability to capture a user’s information.
Whether that’s through asking a user to enter their contact details to view their results, or placing a pixel on your page allowing you to re-target them later, a quiz is an effective way to attract and capture leads.
You can even get more strategic about how you use your quiz, even going so far to help you qualify leads, segment them, and push them further down your sales funnel.
Step 1 – Choose a Topic for Your Quiz
The key to picking the right topic for your quiz is to understand what kind of problems your ideal lead is facing.
This is different from other types of content where you are looking to provide a single answer to a very specific problem. The very nature of a quiz means that you’re able to come up with different solutions to a single obstacle.
Ask yourself:
What it is your ideal lead needs a personalized answer on?
For example, at Birchbox they understood that a problem that their customers were facing was not knowing what kind of facemask product they should purchase for their skin type.
In order to deal with this they created the “Find Your Face Mask Soul Mate in One Minute” quiz designed to address that exact problem.
The quiz asks a number of questions about the user’s skin type, personality, and beauty routine before finally giving a personalized recommendation for a product.
Not only does this instill a sense of trust and authority with their target audience, but it also gives Birchbox an effective way to highlight the variety of products they have.
For those of you who don’t have multiple products though, then I would recommend going for a “What kind of _____ are you” or a “Test the health/knowledge of your _____” kind of quizzes.
These types of quizzes great because they target those basic human desire of wanting to know more about ourselves.
For example, let’s take a look at Jeff Bullas’s “What Type of Digital Marketer Are You?” quiz.
With this type of quiz Jeff Bullas was able to appeal directly to his target audience, digital marketers, while allows him to self-segment and qualify themselves as leads.
One great place to start when brainstorming for quiz topics is look at your most popular pieces of content.
Save yourself some time and effort by seeing if you can re-use any of your previous work to create your quiz.
Step 2 – Pick the Right Kind of Quiz for Your Audience
Now that you’ve figured out what kind of topic you want to do it’s time to understand what kind of quiz format you’re going to use.
While there are a number of tools and platforms you can use to create your quiz, we personally recommend using Thrive Quiz Builder. We like it because it has a variety of options that give you the flexibility to create quizzes that suit any situation you need.
It’s also very customizable so you can created awesome quizzes that pop.
So for this example, we’ll be showing you how to use that software to create our quiz.
Since you’re making a quiz for lead generation your best options are to use either the Category or Percentage quiz formats.
A percentage quiz format will give the user a result from 0 to 100% based on the answers they gave in the quiz. This makes this type of quiz format ideal for the “Test the health/knowledge of your _____” quizzes.
In the following example by GetSmarter you can see how the quiz tests a lead’s knowledge of social media marketing and the results page will differ depending on the amount of correct answers a lead gave. Also make sure to take notice of how the results page also slides in a CTA for their online short course regardless of the result.
On the other hand a category quiz format is much more flexible, as instead of testing a lead’s knowledge, it instead sorts the lead into a category or label of your choosing. While this is the most complicated type of quiz and requires a bit more time to setup, it is also ideal for having your leads self-segment and qualify themselves.
The category style quizzes are most commonly used as personalty quizzes and appeals to our desire of learning more about ourselves. But a more strategic way to use a category style quiz is to solve a problem for your lead.
For example, while you can create an in-depth article exploring the pros and cons of different sales funnel platforms, you can also create a quiz around that topic as well. You can see how I’ve created a quiz based around helping people figure out what webinar platform is best for them and their business using Thrive Quiz Builder.
It’s important to remember that when you’re building your lead generating quiz that the type of quiz you choose depends heavily on what you and your lead’s goals are.
Different quiz formats are better suited for different customer segments and different stages of the sales funnel.
Step 3 – Making Your Quiz Produce The Best Leads
Once you’ve figured out what topic and style your quiz is going to be, it’s time to make sure that it’s going to produce the right leads for your business.
While anyone who takes your quiz is a potential prospect, I personally prefer creating a quiz that has leads qualify and segment themselves. This makes it easier for me to get an understanding of which leads are of higher-quality and more likely to become a customer.
In a percentage type quiz this could mean segmenting leads based on the score they receive, for example those who scored higher that 50% are better leads. Whereas for a category type quiz that could mean those who are in a certain category are higher quality leads.
The best place to start when creating your quiz is to create results based upon your segments.
You can sort your leads based on any number of factors such as what industry they’re in, the level of expertise they have, or if they’re facing a problem that I can provide a solution for. From there it’s just a matter of mapping your answers to their results.
Another incredibly effective way to further qualify your leads is to entice them with another lead magnet, or use a direct upsell, on the results page.
Depending on what kind of quiz you’re making you can either give use the same lead magnet for every result, or tailor the lead magnets to specific results.
For Afar, a traveling magazine, they created a quiz called “Where Should You Go in 2015” where after answering several questions the user would be given a locale in the world as a result.
What really did really well though was also providing a travel guide based on the result you received, as well as listing several local hotspots that the user might be interested in.
This incredibly simple tactic let Afar generate over 5000 new email subscribers at a 25% conversion rate.
Step 4 – Making Your Quiz Social-Media-Ready
Before you go off and start promoting your quiz on ever social media platform available, make sure that you take a moment to ensure that your quiz is both engaging and appealing to your leads.
The first step to making your quiz social-media ready is to craft an eye-catching title. When you consider the fact that 80% of readers determine if something is worth their time by the title alone, you want to make sure you nail the title of your quiz.
Fortunately there are more than a handful of tried and true templates of click-worthy titles that you can use for your own quiz like:
- How much do you actually know about _______?
- What kind of ______ are you?
- The easy way to find out what ________ is right for you!
- Should you hire a ________?
- What does _____ say about you?
The next step is to ensure that your quiz stands out on people’s social feeds is to get your visual elements right. For a quiz that means finding a cover photo of your quiz, ideally with a person’s face in it, and creating a short and snappy description.
The final step to making your quiz social-media-ready is to ensure that your results page stands out. Part of what makes quizzes so powerful is that people naturally want to show off their results to others, so it’s really important that you create results that actively encourages your leads to share it with others.
This is where Thrive Quiz Builder really shows why it’s the best of the bunch as it gives you a variety of ways to customize and optimize your results page for lead capture.
The first is the ability to add in an image that corresponds to the result and craft an engaging results description. One thing to remember when you’re creating your results page is that you want to give your leads a reason to share their results.
So make sure that every result you create is positive. You want people to share their result even if it’s bad one.
To kick it up a notch, Thrive Quiz Builder also allows me to also customize my lead capture form depending on what result your lead receives.
This allows you to ensure that the right leads are being shown the right lead magnet, as well as being able to run split tests of my quiz so I can further optimize it for the best results.
I also likes that it gives me the option to run split tests of my quiz so I can further optimize it for best results.
Step 5 – Follow Up!
The final part of creating an effective lead generating quiz is to make sure you follow up with all your leads.
What I particularly like about Thrive Quiz Builder is that I can integrate it with most email service services so I can easily automate the entire process, as well as create specific sequences for certain results.
Generally speaking, you want to use around 4 emails in your follow-up sequence.
Email #1 – Thanks for Taking the Quiz
As soon as someone has finished your quiz you should immediately send them an email with their results again, this time in more detail, and thanking them for their time. This is incredibly important as this is how you begin to bridge the gap in a prospect’s mind between a random quiz they’ve taken and knowing more about who you are and what your brand is all about.
This also presents a great opportunity for you to build up that sense of trust and authority with your brand even more by including a bonus or reward in your first email.
Email #2 – Relevant Examples and Case Studies
The next email you should send in your sequence is one to continue building up that sense of trust and authority with the lead. Do this by connecting your lead’s quiz results with real life case studies and examples of others who have achieved, or exemplify, the same results.
This is an opportunity for you to connect where a prospect currently is with someone who has achieved their goals. By doing this you’re showing your lead how their quiz results is an indicator for further success.
Begin pre-selling by introducing the problems of your included examples and how they found their solutions. Focus on the pain points of your case studies and relate them back to the prospect as much as possible
This email is also a great opportunity for you to start introducing more information about your brand by linking them to free resources on your site as well.
Email #3 – How “X Result” Achieves Success
The third email in your email sequence should be getting into the details of how you can help as well as establishing yourself as an authority and expert on the topic.
After introducing the problem in the previous email it’s time to showcase how your prospect can achieve success. Treat this email as a soft sell for your services and showcase how you can help overcome the obstacles that a prospect is facing.
The goal of this email is to begin generating more of your lead’s interest into how you can help. You can see how in the following example it includes a CTA to schedule a meeting offering a personalized solution.
Email #4 – Free Recommendations for “X Result”
The final email is to seal the deal and finally converting your leads into customers.
By now your prospect should be familiar with your brand, what you offer, and trust your authority. With this email you can either make a direct sell to a prospect, or entice with another low-tier offer to enter a more streamlined sales cycle.
This can be achieved by sending them to a landing page optimized to this type of lead, or sending them discount codes for example.
Final Thoughts
Feeling like you’re ready to create your own quiz now?
When it comes to creating a high-conventing content strategy you should be looking to take advantage of every tool at your disposal and that includes quizzes.
Quizzes are a great way to add an interactive element into your content marketing and to help differentiate yourself from the rest of the competition.
It might be seem a little daunting, but as you can see through the steps we’ve outlined here, it’s surprisingly easy once you get into it. Especially if you use a tool like Thrive Quiz Builder.
What kind of quizzes have you taken in the past? Are there any lead generating quizzes you particularly like? Let us know in the comments below!